Architect and critic Witold Rybczynski spoke recently about one of Norman Foster’s first works, the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts in Anglia, Norwich, which he’s just written a book about. While Rybczynski didn’t have anything particularly resonant to say about that building, he did a brilliant job of introducing Foster to the audience. To do so he showed slides of the Reliance Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon, England, a project Foster had completed just a few years earlier in 1967, in collaboration with his classmate Richard Rogers.
Foster’s first commissions were for warehouses and industrial buildings, which makes perfect sense, because his work is all about magnificent shells. He seems much more concerned with external structures than interior worlds, and yet the structures he devises often make splendid interiors. It’s easy to lampoon his recent work. The London Gherkin and the Hearst Tower in New York are better-known as emblems of urban ostentation than as architecture. But when looking at photos of the Reliance building it’s easy to see what Foster’s interests are and where his work is headed. These structures are banal syntactically, close to vernacular forms except for their exposed tie rods and attenuated, unperturbed horizontal proportions. (They were razed in 1990 to make room for a big box computer store.) They are super-fine sheds.